The Reckoning How the Killing of One Man Changed the Fate of the Promised Land

From best-selling author of Fighter Boys, a gripping true detective story into a shooting that had momentous consequences for the modern world. What happened when the lawman and the terrorist came face to face - adversaries who matched each other in determination, cunning, courage and ruthlessness? This book is the first to tell the tale. As the world plunged into global conflict, in British governed Palestine a killing took place that shook British and Middle Eastern politics. While in neighbouring Egypt, British forces were confronting Rommel's Afrika Korps, a series of robberies in Palestine by the militant Zionists of the Stern Gang, led by the charismatic Avraham Stern - known as 'the light' by his followers, began a war with their colonial governors. Soon they had targeted and killed policemen, initiating a huge manhunt amid Tel-Aviv's hotbed of suspicion, violence and fanaticism. Assistant Superintendent Geoffrey Morton, a middle-class Londoner who had swapped milk deliveries for the excitements and dangers of colonial policing, was the man tasked with stopping Stern. When finally he succeeded, his shots would echo through the years. The Reckoning is the tale of the man who terrorised Israel, the man determined to prevent him, and the creation of a cult of martyrdom that destroyed of any hope of compromise between Arab and Jew. With access to Geoffrey Morton's previously unseen archive, master storyteller Patrick Bishop uncovers the thrilling chase that impacted on a region and a century with effects that the modern world still feels, profoundly, today.